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conuly
Just for a bit to gape and ask "Do you understand this?", the implication being that he didn't. (I *let* him have it, it wasn't, you know, snatched out of my grasp.)
I just kinda shrugged at him. I didn't see that as the point.
I'm browsing around a bit and remembering that I re-read Emma in Winter a lot as a kid. I never really understood it, but I liked it.
Oftentimes a "kid's review" over at Amazon will whine "I didn't understand it!!!!! And it sucks!!!!" except they'll spell it all wrong and forget to capitalize. They always do this about books I thought at their approximate ages to be perfectly plain and obvious, but... honestly, as a kid I never really thought understanding it was the point. You read a book, you take what you can, you read it again. After you read it several times you understand it a bit more. Sometimes you understand one chapter only to lose it the next time you read it, that happens.
Some books, of course, were transparently easy to grasp. The various series fiction might've been incredibly formulaic, but that meant that you never had to figure them out. The Giver might hit you over the head a few times, but once you stop trying to work out the math it's painfully obvious what's going on. But just understanding a book is not the same as liking it, and the two never seemed (or still seem - I read most PTerry books twice before I really get the surface of them, and that's not even getting into any sort of annotation, but I don't know why this is) to correlate.
Textbooks should be clear and simple, which is why they're so often boring, but book books? I don't know.
But maybe I'm weird like that, and most people value clear comprehension somewhere higher than I do?
I just kinda shrugged at him. I didn't see that as the point.
I'm browsing around a bit and remembering that I re-read Emma in Winter a lot as a kid. I never really understood it, but I liked it.
Oftentimes a "kid's review" over at Amazon will whine "I didn't understand it!!!!! And it sucks!!!!" except they'll spell it all wrong and forget to capitalize. They always do this about books I thought at their approximate ages to be perfectly plain and obvious, but... honestly, as a kid I never really thought understanding it was the point. You read a book, you take what you can, you read it again. After you read it several times you understand it a bit more. Sometimes you understand one chapter only to lose it the next time you read it, that happens.
Some books, of course, were transparently easy to grasp. The various series fiction might've been incredibly formulaic, but that meant that you never had to figure them out. The Giver might hit you over the head a few times, but once you stop trying to work out the math it's painfully obvious what's going on. But just understanding a book is not the same as liking it, and the two never seemed (or still seem - I read most PTerry books twice before I really get the surface of them, and that's not even getting into any sort of annotation, but I don't know why this is) to correlate.
Textbooks should be clear and simple, which is why they're so often boring, but book books? I don't know.
But maybe I'm weird like that, and most people value clear comprehension somewhere higher than I do?
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no subject
Date: 2010-05-16 06:59 am (UTC)I also definitely forced my way through a few books much too young and missed appreciating much about them, but I reread them all later and loved them then.
I do, though, think I know what a lot of those kids mean: I suspect they don't mean "I don't understand" so much as "I can't identify," which was my primary reason for hating books (mostly realistic fiction, especially historical) as a kid and teen (including a number of books I had to read for school). If I couldn't get an emotional grasp on what the main character of a book was experiencing, I tended to dislike the whole thing very much.